Discussions in the Hampstead Index on ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’: V. The Mechanisms of Defence, Part 2

J. Sandler: I should like to take up the question of sublimation again in regard to a patient of mine who is a woman who had a very Prussian upbringing with a very strict Prussian superego. She has a number of step-children and suffers from great conflicts about them. She says she would like them to be very obedient, but feels that if she were to be strict she would be attacked by the family of her husband's late wife. She has turned particularly against one of the children, a drop-out from college, clearly because she cannot bear to see in him the self-indulgence which she dislikes so much in herself. Now this lady has a dog whom she enters in obedience trials, and the dog wins them all. She has only to lift her little finger, and the dog obeys. She is obviously extremely good at training the dog, and clearly she gets relief from some internal conflict by creating a situation in which the dog is perfectly obedient. Would one call this a sublimation or not? Although it could be said that the activity was a drive derivative, we could also say that her strict and punitive superego has attained a certain autonomy, so that the gratification which she gets through training her dog and winning the competitions might well be something other than gratification of her aggression. This opens up the question of whether activities which are not indirect instinctual